The National Book Foundation made a donation to the Matthew Shepard Foundation when Lauren Myracle's accidental inclusion among this year's nominees for the National Book Award in the Young People's Literature category ended when the author withdrew her novel Shine from consideration. The novel deals with the issues of hate crimes and the bullying of gay teens.

Rob Byrnes fifth novel, Holy Rollers, will be released by Bold Strokes this month. Byrnes and pals will be celebrating November 16, 2011 with a book launch at The Ritz Bar & Lounge in Manhattan.

Out this month from the University of Texas Press is Sam J. Miller’s book, Horror After 9/11, an anthology of essays about how the horror film has changed since September 11, 2001. Miller co-edited the book with Aviva Briefel. Miller and friends will celebrate with a book launch November 12th at 2PM at Bluestockings Books.

On Saturday, November 12, at noon at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, some of the city’s notable members of the LGBTQ community will participate in “A Conversation on Race & Gender in Queer Culture.” The event is free and open to the public. More details at www.afpls.org.

Icarus, the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction, now has a spot in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia

David Rakoff has won the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his collection of essays, Half Empty.

On October 9, 2011 an historical marker was placed outside Giovanni’s Room by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission honoring the LGBT bookstore. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter was among those in attendance at the ceremonies, which coincided with the annual OutFest in Center City.

The Rainbow Book Fair will be March 24, 2012 from 11 am to 5:30 pm in New York. Check the Web site (http://rainbowbookfair.org/) for more details on exhibitors, speakers, and events, which next year will take over two floors at the LGBT Center in Manhattan.

Open Calls: Submissions are now being accepted for the Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival’s Third Annual Short Fiction Contest. SAS Fest is seeking original, unpublished short stories between 5,000 and 7,000 words with GLBT content on the broad theme of “Saints and Sinners.” For more details, visit www.sasfest.org.

Deadline for Issue 2 of Chelsea Station, a new magazine of gay writing, is December 1, 2011. The magazine includes original and unpublished fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, memoir, humor, narrative travelogue, interviews, and reviews (books, theater, television, and film) relating to gay literature and gay men. Submissions should be sent to info@chelseastationeditions.com. Manuscripts should be emailed as Word attachments. Please include your name, address, and e-mail contact information on the first page of your document. Please also include a brief bio. Please do not send more than one prose work or more than four poems for consideration. Please query if you would like to submit work for consideration in more than one genre for an issue. For more information visit http://www.chelseastationeditions.com/ChelseaStation-ALiteraryJournal.html.

The Queer Foundation's annual High School Seniors English Essay Contest is now underway. Deadline is February 18, 2012. The top essayists are awarded $1,000 scholarships to attend the U.S. college or university of their choice. For more information visit http://www.queerfoundation.org/.

About Me

Jameson Currier is the author of six novels: Where the Rainbow Ends, nominated for a Lambda Literary award, The Wolf at the Door, The Third Buddha, What Comes Around, The Forever Marathon, and A Gathering Storm; and four collections of short fiction: Dancing on the Moon; Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex; Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories; and The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, which was awarded a Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Fiction Collection. His short fiction has appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies, and Web sites. His reviews, essays, interviews, and articles on AIDS and gay literature and culture have been published in many national and local publications. In 2010 he launched Chelsea Station Editions, an independent press focused on gay literature. In 2011 he launched Chelsea Station, a literary journal of gay writing, now online at www.chelseastationmagazine.com. He currently resides in Manhattan and can be reached by e-mail at jimcurrier@aol.com.

Author Jameson Currier expands his richly detailed storytelling to an international level, weaving together the intertwining stories of the search for a missing journalist in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan with a young man's search for his older brother in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11 into a sweeping, multi-cultural novel of what it means to be a gay citizen of the world.

The Wolf at the Door

Available from Chelsea Station Editions

A witty tour de force of spirits, spooks, and sinners, a supernatural roller coaster set in the Big Easy that is giddy, soulful, and sentimental.

"Currier is one of the few writers who can equally be literary, erotic, dramatic and damn funny, sometimes all in the same sentence." Sean Meriwether, The Silent Hustler

The Haunted Heart and Other Talesghost stories by Jameson Currier

In his newest collection of short stories, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, author Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.

“Jameson Currier’s The Haunted Heart and Other Tales expands upon the usual ghost story tropes by imbuing them with deep metaphorical resonance to the queer experience. Infused with flawed, three-dimensional characters, this first-rate collection strikes all the right chords in just the right places. Equal parts unnerving and heartrending, these chilling tales are testament to Currier’s literary prowess and the profound humanity at the core of his writing. Gay, straight, twisted like a pretzel…his writing is simply not to be missed by any reader with a taste for good fiction.”
Vince Liaguno, Dark Scribe Magazine

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson CurrierStill Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier, published by Lethe Press, brings together 20 of the author’s short stories about the impact of AIDS on the gay community which have been written over the last three decades. Along with ten stories from Currier’s debut collection Dancing on the Moon (1993), praised by The Village Voice as “defiant and elegiac,” are ten newly selected stories written by one of our preeminent masters of the short narrative form. And for this new collection the author has also chosen stories that revolve around gay New Yorkers—those lost, those surviving, those displaced, those undaunted, and those who became expatriates.

"In these stories, Currier fictionalizes queer life and times from three decades of the AIDS era, capturing the years in his prose. It has the literary heft of Camus and the quiet urbanity of Cheever…. Currier chronicles not only a defining era in gay America, but the private lives of the people who triumphed through what looked like defeat. These lives are often so finely drawn, Currier never has to resort to cliché… Gritty, esoteric, funny and passionate, Currier’s courageous prose reminds us that we must never forget."Lewis Whittington, EDGE